Visualize points and routes with GeoJSON in Amazon Quick Sight layer maps

With Amazon Quick Sight layer maps, you can now plot points and routes, like store locations across a city or flights leaving an airport. Geospatial maps help businesses spot patterns that are tied to location, like how a region is performing or where customers are concentrated. Amazon Quick Sight supports this with multiple map types, including point maps, filled maps, and layer maps. When layer maps first launched , you could upload a GeoJSON file to draw custom shape layers, such as sales territories or districts, and join those shapes to a dataset. That handled regions and boundaries well, but it didn’t cover the individual locations inside them or the routes running between them.

Layer maps now support two more geometry types from the same GeoJSON workflow: Point and LineString . Points mark specific locations, such as individual store or facility sites. A LineString traces the route between locations, like a delivery path or a flight between airports.

Amazon Quick Sight , the business intelligence (BI) capability of Amazon Quick , is a unified BI service. It delivers modern interactive dashboards, natural language querying, pixel-perfect reports, machine learning (ML) insights, and embedded analytics at scale. Amazon Quick brings together AI agents for business insights, research, and automation in one integrated experience, helping you work smarter and faster while maintaining security and access policies.

When you need to control the viewport in layer map visuals, you can pan and zoom to the view you want manually. Then disable map navigation to lock it in place. For use cases where you need more precise boundaries or programmatic control, you can set the exact viewport coordinates through the visual definition using the Quick Sight APIs.

For use cases that require combining multiple geometry types into a single view, you can layer visuals on top of each other. For example, the following screenshot demonstrates plotting customer locations as points within US regional boundaries defined by polygons. This composition shows which territories have the highest customer density and can be used to correlate with other metrics present in the dataset like performance.

GeoJSON is a JSON-based format for describing geographic features such as points and lines.

Layer map visuals now support LineString geometry, connecting an ordered list of coordinates into a single path. As covered in the data structure section, each route is one feature, and its coordinates are the ordered positions the map connects in sequence.

With the added support for GeoJSON point layers in layer map visuals, Quick Sight now offers a second point mapping capability with a few key differences. Layer map visual points use a uniform marker size and don’t support geocoding, so you provide explicit coordinates in the GeoJSON file. In return, you can control the viewport precisely, locking the map to an exact geographic region, and disabling panning and zooming.

In this post, we walk through the dataset and GeoJSON structure that layer maps require. We also explain how points and lines work in a layer map visual and when to choose each. Finally, we cover advanced techniques for controlling the viewport, layering geometries, and updating GeoJSON files programmatically.

A layer map gets its shapes from a GeoJSON file and its metrics from a Quick Sight dataset, and a shared key joins the two. How you structure each one determines what the map can show. This section covers what you need before you start and how a GeoJSON file is organized.

In Quick Sight, when you configure a layer in a layer map visual, there are two primary settings to consider. The first is the Geometry type to visualize , which sets which geometry from the GeoJSON file renders: Points, Lines, or Polygons. A layer renders one geometry type at a time, so when a file mixes types like the preceding example, only Features of the selected type appear on the map. The second is matching the Shape file key field to the Dataset key field , which links each Feature in the GeoJSON to a row in your Quick Sight dataset. The field names don’t need to be identical, but the values do. The following two examples show this end to end, first a LineString layer and then a Point layer.